Digging Through the Bible: Understanding Biblical People, Places, and Controversies through Archaeology

By Richard A Freund

A “masterful and eminently readable” journey through the fascinating insights and revelations of Biblical archeology (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Many of our religious beliefs are based on faith alone, but archaeology gives us the opportunity to find evidence about what really happened in the distant past—evidence that can have a dramatic impact on what and how we believe. In Digging Through the Bible, archaeologist and rabbi Richard Freund takes readers through digs he has led in the Holy Land, searching for evidence about key biblical characters and events. 

Digging Through the Bible presents overviews of the evidence surrounding figures such as Moses, Kings David and Solomon, and Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as new information that can help us more fully understand the life and times in which these people would have lived. Freund also presents new evidence about finding the grave of the Teacher of Righteousness mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and gives a compelling argument about how the Exodus of the Israelites may have taken place in three separate waves over time, rather than in a single event as presented in the Bible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9780742563490

Book preview

DIGGING THROUGH

THE BIBLE

Map of the Holy Land.

DIGGING THROUGH

THE BIBLE

UNDERSTANDING BIBLICAL PEOPLE,

PLACES, AND CONTROVERSIES

THROUGH ARCHAEOLOGY

RICHARD A. FREUND

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Published in the United States of America

by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowmanlittlefield.com

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United Kingdom

Copyright © 2009 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Freund, Richard A.

Digging through the Bible : understanding biblical people, places, and controversies through archaeology / Richard A. Freund.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-4644-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-7425-4644-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

eISBN-13: 978-0-7425-6349-0

eISBN-10: 0-7425-6349-9

1. Bible—Antiquities. 2. Bible—Evidences, authority, etc. 3. Bible—History of Biblical events. 4. Palestine—History—To 70 A.D. I. Title.

BS621.F736 2009

220.9’3—dc22

2008018594

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

contents

Chronology of Events

Introduction A CRASH COURSE IN BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

CHAPTER 1

The Search for Sinai: Archaeological Reflections on Moses, the Exodus, and the Revelation at Mount Sinai

CHAPTER 2

Searching for King David and King Solomon and the Ancient City of Jerusalem

CHAPTER 3

Searching for Jesus in Galilee and Babylonia

CHAPTER 4

Searching Her Stories: Women in Ancient Israel

CHAPTER 5

Searching for Synagogues: A Lost Synagogue Ritual Recovered by Archaeology

CHAPTER 6

Searching for the Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran and in the Dead Sea Scrolls

CHAPTER 7

Seeking Mary, Mother of Jesus; Miriam, Sister of Moses; and the Well and Bathhouse of Nazareth

CHAPTER 8

The Search for Bar Kokhba: One Biblical Character Who Was Found

Appendix EXPLORING AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

Chronology of Events

The History of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Israel

Introduction: A Crash Course in Biblical Archaeology

Is this a new Dead Sea Scroll?

Almost everyone has questions about the truth behind their religious beliefs at some point in their lives. Most of the time beliefs have to be taken on faith alone, but science and the scientific method have been used over the past few hundred years to understand traditionally held beliefs. One area of science, archaeology, offers us the rare chance to assess traditionally held views on the Bible. In Digging through the Bible I will explore what archaeological evidence proves (and doesn’t prove) about some of the Bible’s most intriguing people, places, and controversies. Drawing on my work at numerous excavations in the Holy Land, as well as my experience as both a rabbi and university professor, we will see how the coincidence of artifacts and literature enlighten us to the Bible and archaeology. Some of what I have to say is found in other books, but some of what I write here is not found in any other book; it is information that I have come to understand only from my experience in the field.

I have always been interested in answering questions with evidence. When I was a child, perhaps eight years old, I vividly remember an experience in Sunday School that caused me to embark on a lifelong search for physical evidence of the Exodus and its meaning. I was fascinated with the Tabernacle that the Israelites built in the desert after their Exodus from Egypt. This Tabernacle, or movable tent shrine, was unusual because of all of the materials necessary for its creation. I remember reading the section on the creation of the Tabernacle in the Book of Exodus 25, right after the story of the Exodus and was intrigued by one detail. In most translations of the story, it says that they decorated the Tabernacle with a covering of dolphin skins. I asked my teacher: Mr. Stanger, where did these former slaves from Egypt in the middle of the Sinai desert get the dolphin skins from? It was a moment that forever changed my thought process. The teacher turned to me with a look that reminded me of a deer caught in the headlights and did not know what to respond. He understood that the dolphin skins were an exotic item for former Egyptian slaves to have had with them as they left Egypt, and he realized that there were no Wal-Marts in the middle of the Sinai Desert, but he also understood a child’s need for a practical and reasonable solution to a simple question. His answer came after a short silence. He replied: God can provide anything, even in the desert. Why not dolphin skins? For some of the children in the Hebrew School it was a reasonable answer. But I was not satisfied with the answer. It put me on a lifelong search for more evidence. Archaeology has provided some of that evidence, offered a method for study, and given me a respect for what material culture can and cannot do in understanding an ancient literature like the Bible.

I am interested as a professor of ancient history in a college devoted to arts and sciences to know how we know what we think we know about the Bible and the world. I think knowing how we know what we know (and what we do not know) is one of those fundamental questions of the university that I have had to deal with in working in biblical archaeology. Before the present period, we knew what we knew from traditional sources of wisdom that did not have to be challenged. Traditional wisdom about the world had to be accepted by people because it was a part of their religious and often national identity. With the rise of the modern nation-state and academic disciplines in unaffiliated universities that were unfettered by the confines of ancient traditional wisdom, many of the dogmas that were a part of religion and science were questioned. The modern study of archaeology and the Bible has been rocked by questions that challenge generations of traditional knowledge. What was it that made the Da Vinci Code so provocative? Even as fiction it was supposedly based upon information that had been discovered in the past sixty years and which challenged traditional wisdom about the nature of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The recent publication and fascination with the nearly eighteen-hundred-year-old Gnostic Judas Gospel, which was revealed to the public in the same year as the Da Vinci Code movie, raises a similar question. What if Judas as depicted in the canonical gospels was different from the historical Judas? A spectacular archaeological discovery at Nag Hammadi in the desert of Egypt just over sixty years ago brought these alternative gospels to light, and they continue to challenge our traditional understandings of the canonical biblical accounts. In many ways, the Da Vinci Code controversy and the Judas Gospel and many other issues that I will be presenting in this book are asking the same question. What if all of the major assumptions about the people and places of the Bible are just elaborate deceptions that have gained credibility with time but they were not true even in the period in which they were written down? Would it make a difference? I think so.

What Is the Bible?

It was with these provocative questions in mind that Digging Through The Bible was born. This book is about the people, places, and controversies from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), New Testament, and even books that did not make it into the canon of the Bible but were clearly intended to be considered holy in antiquity, and how archaeology has helped us better understand these people, places, and controversies. The idea of biblical figures and their continuation throughout and beyond the scope of the Bible is also a major focus in the book. A biblical figure has a trajectory that goes beyond the scope of just the Bible. Unlike many of my colleagues, I value biblical commentaries and their interpretations as providing an insight into the text. Sometimes the insight is far afield from the ancient original meaning of the text, but sometimes it contains the seed of an ancient tradition that we could not recover but for this medieval kernel of information. When compared with archaeological and other ancient comparative materials, the biblical commentators often seem out of place and clearly off the mark, but sometimes they preserve an understanding of the text that explains the archaeology and comparative materials better than the ancient materials explain themselves.

I discovered just how important traditional common wisdom about an individual can be when I excavated a site that has become associated with John the Baptist. I became known for a time as the person who discovered the site of the burial of John the Baptist, and although I never said that I had discovered John the Baptist (as you will read in this book, it was the result of a well-intentioned press release by my university that just got out of control), it was interesting just how important it was to people on the street. To this day I meet people and they say: Oh, yeah, I know you, you are the person who discovered John the Baptist! The next question they asked was: Did you discover his head with the body? This is not a simple question and answer as you shall see. I began investigating the traditions surrounding John the Baptist and discovered that John the Baptist’s head and body are located by many postbiblical traditions in many different locations around the world, and so we had become (not intentionally!) another one of these postbiblical traditions.

When speaking in front of teachers, students, and community people at universities, churches, synagogues, and civic organizations, I have heard an increasing number of questions about what evidence (outside of the Bible) exists to authenticate the stories of the Bible. Often what this question misses is just how much more we know today about how and why the Bible was written that affects our understanding of biblical traditions. I have noticed that people’s general knowledge about the Bible has decreased in the past generation, but their curiosity about the biblical places and people has grown in this same period. I have found that people really want to know what can be proven about those places and people. So I set out to see for myself what could be discovered using archaeology and a variety of other techniques that historians use to evaluate traditional, as well as conventional wisdom. Since I have been working in the discovery of sites that are mentioned in the New Testament, I found that people wanted to know what the evidence suggests about Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, Paul, the Apostles, Herod the Great, and a host of others.

Mary, Mother of Jesus, for example, appears in so many places throughout the world, I started to track her throughout these different places from Israel, Europe, and Latin and North America. In addition, I have found that interest in biblical figures such as Abraham, Moses, King David, Solomon, and others was so intense that a book that tracked what we know from archaeology and comparative literature would be valued by the public. Also, many other significant people (both men and women) appear in the Bible, about whom we do have real historical information. Some of these people are perhaps not as famous as Abraham, Moses, King David, Jesus, and John the Baptist, but what we know about them tells us something about the ancient period and how people wrote about people in the ancient period. Some of the people included in this book will be individuals that you will recognize; others you will not. All of these figures contribute to what we know about people, places, and events in the Bible.

What I mean by the Bible is slightly different than what is common wisdom. I include in my definition of the Bible six very different parts:

1. The Hebrew Bible: including the thirty-nine books that Jews call the Tanach and Christians call the Old Testament.

2. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Hebrew Bible: depending on the different collections, could include as many as thirty to forty more books that were written down in the Hellenistic-Roman periods.

3. The New Testament (or Greek/Christian Bible): including the twenty-seven canonized books that Christians call the New Testament.

4. The New Testament Apocrypha and early Christian traditions in the forms of commentaries: including what is commonly called the Gnostic Gospels and as many as thirty different works that were written down from the third century CE through the early Middle Ages but which preserve early Church traditions about biblical figures and places.

5. The Rabbinic and Jewish (pre-Rabbinic) writings: including the writings of Josephus, Philo, Mishnah, the Talmudim, Midrash, and even early medieval Rabbinic Bible commentaries that preserve information about biblical figures and places.

6. The Koranic and Islamic versions of biblical stories: In the Koran and the Hadith (and even Islamic commentators and historians such as Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari in the ninth and tenth century CE, for example) traditions are found that preserve ancient knowledge about people and places in the Bible.

The Critical Study of the Hebrew Bible

The Bible is greater than the sum total of the individuals and places mentioned in it. There was a sense up until the Middle Ages that ongoing revelation empowered writers even in the medieval period to continue to write about biblical figures as if these writings were original to the Bible. Our knowledge of these places and people is also greater than the sum total of the parts of the Bible that mention these places and people. Also, the Bible is not a book of literature, poetry, liturgy, theology, history, religion, science, or even a book in the conventional sense of the word. It is an anthology that was written down over a long period of time by multiple authors and edited together as if it were a single book. Anyone can instinctively see that the composition contains many books that say they were written by different people. A part is called the Book of Isaiah because it is seen to be the writing of a prophet Isaiah, but not the prophet Jeremiah. The Book of Jeremiah was not written by Ezekiel, but by Jeremiah (or better by his scribe, Baruch ben Neriah), etc.

But Bible scholars for the past couple of hundred years have also come to another, broader conclusion about the writing of the Bible. They have unraveled a secret of ancient writing that is demonstrated throughout the Bible. Multiple authors wrote down diverse oral traditions even from the most ancient period of the Bible, and those multiple traditions and writings were edited into what we today call the Bible. Scholars generally call this the documentary hypothesis because it assumes that ancient documents were edited together into what we call the Bible. That is one of the reasons why one cannot easily read the Bible from Genesis to Deuteronomy. It jumps around because different traditions were edited together not so much for easy reading but to provide different traditions the opportunity to be presented.

This edited Bible finally reached a form of completion in the Persian period (fifth to fourth century BCE). Professor Richard E. Friedman, the author of Who Wrote the Bible?, and other source critics have demonstrated that the Bible is a complex document constructed from different and ancient oral and/or short, written versions or accounts that were edited/redacted together following major historical events, such as wars or changes in leadership, in the biblical period. Historians in many fields have recognized this simple rule of thumb for written documents from the ancient through the premodern periods. Writing was not the preferred mode of communication of the traditions and ideas for ancient peoples. For the vast majority of ancient peoples, oral transmission was the preferred mode of communication and writing was used to preserve unique customs and ideas of a people at crucial moments in the history of a people. Writing required specialized talents and materials and until the advent of the printing press, was so unusual that often only a few exemplars of a written work would circulate at any given moment. In short, the creation of what we know as a written Bible would have required an impetus to take the oral tradition and commit it to writing. The impetus that most literary historians have identified was the preservation of a unique event or to save the tradition from extinction. The biblical writing process is linked to the most significant events in the history of the Israelites and the Judeans.

These historical events were so significant that the leaders entrusted with the oral traditions decided to write them down. Following cataclysmic episodes in the biblical period (the schism between the Ten Northern Tribes and the Southern Tribes, the conquest of the ten northern tribes, the destruction of Judea and the Temple of Jerusalem, etc.), many of these leaders were convinced that if the oral traditions were not written down in their own time periods, the entire history might be forgotten. This process of moving the oral biblical traditions to a written form parallels the later but similar process for the redaction/editing of Rabbinic texts. We are lucky that the Rabbis actually relate the reasons why they wrote down their oral traditions. The Rabbis feared that the Jewish people (and the oral traditions that they possessed) would not survive and decided to write down the oral traditions rather than having them be forgotten. The moving of oral Rabbinic traditions to a written form took place in the third century CE, and we can extrapolate from the experience of the Rabbis that a similar fear may have motivated the Gospel writers in the first century CE and even earlier the writers of the Hebrew Bible. Modern New Testament scholars think that all of the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were written down in the late first century CE, following the destruction of the Temple (in 70 CE) and following the dispersion of the Jewish people from Jerusalem and Judea. In the third century CE, following two devastating wars of the Jews against the Romans (First Revolt against Rome 66–73 CE and the Second Revolt against Rome 132–135 CE), the Rabbis concluded that the earliest oral parts of the Jewish tradition (the Mishnah) needed to be written down and properly arranged so that the story of the Jewish people and their laws would not be forgotten.

We know who did this Rabbinic redaction because the process is written about by the Rabbis themselves. Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi finished the first redaction of the earliest group of traditions, the Mishnah, in the third century. But it is clear from the Rabbinic process that many other periods of redaction and editing of these traditions followed for the next three hundred years. New and old traditions continued to be fused into the literature that became the Talmud. This is very similar to the pattern of editing and redaction that the Bible followed. Many modern biblical scholars determined that the Bible was written down over a long stretch of time in critical periods of Israelite/Jewish history, and these critical periods also correspond to archaeological information that excavators have been digging up for more than a century in the Land of Israel. Since I will be relying on the reader to know these events and periods I have summarized them here.

I. The First Period of Biblical Writing

The United Kingdom: 1000 BCE–922 BCE

Since we know from archaeology that the earliest of the few discoveries containing ancient Hebrew writing only date from around the year 1000 BCE, this must be considered the first period of Israelite writing activity that corresponds to the new situation that emerged in the period of the United Kingdom of David. For the first time in the ancient history of the people of Israel, under King David and later his son, Solomon, the United Kingdom of Israel afforded the people the opportunity to have a level of security and stability that invited this writing down of the national epic in their own language. Understanding that the writing was done in this period is important. This United Kingdom was certainly a significant event for the Israelite nation and would have emboldened Israelite writers to see their story, the story of the people of Israel, as unique and worthy of writing down in their own language. Unfortunately, the wealth and optimism of the period of David and Solomon in the southern region of Judea and its capital, Jerusalem, also caused the northern tribes to want their own capital and Temples. This new development prompted the second period of biblical writing, the Great Schism.

II. The Second Period of Biblical Writing The Great Schism: 922 BCE–722 BCE

The first period of biblical writing was very short and probably produced a small selection of the major biblical accounts we recognize today. The second period of biblical writing was longer and was ushered in by an event that pitted the northern tribes against the southern tribes of Israel in a competition for the loyalty of the followers of the God of Israel. The Ten Northern Tribes of Ancient Israel split from the United Kingdom of King David after the death of Solomon. They built their own capital and Temples to suit the northern population and ultimately created and wrote down traditions that related to their own developing views of the Israelite God. This was similar to the great schism that gripped the Roman Catholic Church in the early Middle Ages when Eastern Orthodoxy emerged in the East leaving Roman Catholicism in the West and the American Civil War in which the United States were divided into the Union in the North and the Confederacy of States in the South. The Ten Northern Tribes seceded from their union with the Southern Tribes of the United Kingdom of David after Solomon’s death and his son Rehoboam’s succession in approximately 922 BCE, forming their own separate nation in northern Israel. The northern tribes had their own capital, kings, prophets and priests, and even their own holy Temples and shrines that were different from the Southern tribes that remained with Jerusalem and the Aaronid priesthood. Bible scholars assume that the Northern and Southern Kingdoms (Israel and Judah, respectively) had their own separate versions of the original written documents as their own Torah. It is not clear if this was a written document or still maintained in oral fashion, but in this model, both Judah and Israel each had a Torah they venerated. Similar to the Confederacy that had the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church that shared the New Testament and early Church documents, the Northern and Southern Tribes shared the earliest versions of the Bible, but they had different traditions about people and places in the Land of Israel. The new country of Israel that emerged in 922 BCE (sometimes called the Northern Kingdom of Israel), is distinguished from the earlier Israel that lasted from the time the Israelites came into the Land of Israel from the Exodus from Egypt (in the time of Joshua, thirteenth century BCE) until the dissolution of the Kingdom of David and Solomon in approximately 922 BCE.

In dividing the House of David (or the United Kingdom of David) into two parts, the Northern Kingdom (of ten tribes) retained the title: Israel and the Southern Kingdom was designated by the largest tribe of the region, Judah. Scholars hypothesize that if this division had continued throughout time without further changes, there would be today two very different groups of people that would have had two different versions of the Pentateuch (called by Jews the Torah or the first five books of the Bible): one group would have been Israelites and the other called Judeans. During this entire two-hundred-year period of separation, they both developed laws, stories, and traditions that they closely related to the same nucleus of patriarch and matriarch traditions that the Northern Tribes shared with the Southern Tribes. Similar to the schism that produced Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, two forms of Christianity that both claimed access to the same ancient origins and preserved separate but equally important traditions, the Northern and Southern Kingdoms represent separate but equally authentic brands of ancient Israelite faith and life. Most people have never conceived of the Bible as a compromise document, a book that preserves the traditions of the Israelites and the Judeans with substantially more material from the Judeans because they survived the turmoil of antiquity, while the Northern Tribes did not. For those who know United States history, it is comparable to how the traditions of the Union in the North and the Confederacy in the South were somehow merged in the Reconstruction process following the Civil War. The leaders, ideas, and traditions of the South played a minority role in the history of the United States as it was written after the Civil War.

After the death of King Solomon, his son, Rehoboam, was unable to keep the United Kingdom together. In approximately 922 BCE, the two kingdoms became separate kingdoms. Some two hundred years later, in approximately 722 BCE, the Northern Kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrian Empire and the Israelites exiled from their land. The exiles were either forcibly moved to Assyria in what is modern-day Iraq or some drifted southward to merge with the Judeans and relatives who may have still lived in the south. In the period following the Assyrian Exile, the two main versions of the Bible, one that had developed in the north and one that had developed in the south, were merged into one text. The original writers and the texts they represented were designated by scholars as J (southern) and E (northern). The southern writer was called J for convenience sake by scholars because this writer predominantly used the title of the Divine in his writing as Jehohvah, while the northern writer was called E because this writer predominantly used the title of the Divine in his writing as Elohim.

III. The Third Period of Biblical Writing: 122 BCE–586 BCE

Although 922 BCE, the time of the Great Schism is very important, the period following the destruction of the Northern Kingdom, 722–721 BCE is a critical date for the redaction/editing of the text. It was a cataclysmic event that must have left many people living in the south with the feeling that the end of all Israelite/Judean religion was at hand. The refugees from the north who made it to the south brought with them their most precious legacy—the Torah of the north. This is the period of the Assyrian Exile of the northern Ten Tribes of Israel and the survivors who made it to the south who were a small minority among the southerners. The vast majority of northern tribes were sent into the vast parts of the Assyrian Empire, and there are peoples as far away as China, India, and Afghanistan who claim to be from one of the lost Ten Tribes of Ancient Israel. The northern tribe survivors (E) brought their Bible with them from the north, and all of their traditions were merged with the traditions of the south (J) into one text that became a Bible. But during this period, a third layer of literary activity began and complemented the recombination with these J/E traditions. This third layer of literary activity is from a group that heretofore had closely guarded their own traditions. Their view of what was now Judahism focused on the religious ideas that they, the priests, had carefully maintained.

It is possible to see differences between the J and the E designated texts, not only on the basis of the Divine names but also on issues related to religion and politics. Naturally, E focused primarily on the life of northern Israel and J focused on in events in southern Israel. J and E were probably religious and political leaders, but they were not the most elite group of Judea. The most elite group who carefully guarded their traditions and were responsible for the third literary wave of biblical writing were the Priests in Jerusalem.

The Priests in Jerusalem, starting from the time of King Solomon, were a special and influential group of families that closely guarded their dynastic rule. It is not surprising, therefore, that Bible scholars have found within the text of the Bible a very clear literary stratum that was written by the Priests. The priestly writer (Kohanim-Aaronids) designated by scholars as P wrote after 722 BCE, when a written, combined J/E text may have begun circulating, and before 586 BCE, the date of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, when the central bastions of the power of the priesthood were suddenly removed. P appeared not long after the composition of the combined J/E text as a counterbalance to the stories being told by the J and E traditions that they did not control. P’s version is an alternative view of the Bible to that of J and E, and one can easily see that the P writer is a different type of writer than the J and E writers. He uses lots of numbers, dates, and ages and has fewer puns and literary devices, such as irony, that appear in J and E texts. P is primarily interested in items related to priesthood, rituals, and promoting only priestly issues of sacrifices and priestly authority sometimes at the expense of other authority figures of the Bible from the Patriarchs and even before the time of the Patriarchs, such as Cain and Abel and Noah. Sacrifices in the Bible done by anyone other than the Aaronid priesthood were seen as invalid, and therefore the P text does not contain these narratives. The P writer probably felt that anyone else described as performing ritual sacrifices in the Bible undermined the priestly authority.

So when we read about the sacrifices of Cain, Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for example, even before there was a priesthood according to the final story line of the Bible, you can tell immediately that these are narratives that have been preserved by non-priests (J/E texts). But P also had a variety of theological differences with the rest of the people. In P’s text the priest was the ultimate intermediary before God through the sacrificial ritual. It was probably hard for P to even hear the episodes about so many non-priests who had conversations with God. P’s text does not have conversations between humans, and P’s image of the Divine reveals a very impersonal and cosmic ruler in comparison with the writing of J/E. P’s writings do not generally contain the concept of mercy for example, but justice appears many times, meted out by God’s official representatives, the priests. No miraculous (breaking of Divine nature) events occur that involve talking animals in the texts of P (J and E have talking snakes and donkeys), no angels (Divine messengers), no dream accounts (Divine dreams such as in the Joseph story), no prophets (except Aaron, of course). The holy four letter (tetragrammaton) name of the ancient God of Israel, YHVH is not the name of choice in the writings of P; Elohim is used because YHVH was seen as a semi-secret name used only by the High Priest on Yom Kippur (the holiest day of the year) in the Temple in the Holy of Holies to maintain its holy status.

IV The Fourth Period of Biblical Writing: 640 BCE–586 BCE

The next major period of Biblical writing occurred in the period beginning with the rule of King Josiah in Jerusalem in 640–609 BCE and continuing up until the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile in 586 BCE. During this period many reforms took place, most of which were motivated by King Josiah in Jerusalem, probably through the intervention of a major literary prophet like Jeremiah. In this period, we have the writing of another version of the national epic, this time by a writer who has the advantage of knowledge of many more traditions, knows the traditions of J/E and P but has a history of events that were different from the other writers. This document became known by scholars as D because it starts in Deuteronomy with a total recapitulation of all of the major ancient history from Egypt back to Israel. D is a self-contained literary unit that continues to include all of the events from the entrance into the Land of Israel at the end of the Exodus, the history of the Judges, the early Prophets and the beginnings of the kingship narratives. This was a totally different corpus of information probably maintained by the royal court scribes and the scribes used by the official prophetic groups that the court would consult. While the Priests would have their own scribes, the Court of the king would have its own scribes as well.

The court history came to a halting stop at the end of this period with the most cataclysmic event of biblical times—the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The Babylonian Empire, which destroyed not only the Temple and the priesthood and exiled the people of Judah to Babylonia, but also destroyed the tradition of kingship among the Jews. The reforms of King Josiah may have spawned the court history version of ancient history of Israel to be written down for the first time just before the impending Babylonian Exile (ten years before the Exile–597 BCE—the Babylonians had already made their direction known). The Babylonian Exile lasted only about fifty years, but it sparked a new final editorial process that brought all of the disparate traditions together into a literary work that became something that was much closer to what we call today the Torah.

V. The Fifth and Final Period of Biblical Writing: 536–519 BCE and into the Fifth Century BCE

With the rise of the Persian Empire, especially Cyrus the Great, who basically liberated the exiles according to the Bible, the Judean exiles could choose to stay in Babylonia and throughout the Persian Empire or return to Israel. Many stayed in Persia, recorded in books such as Daniel and Esther, which are set in the Persian Empire, while others returned to their home country. The Return to Zion is the time beginning under the leadership of the Aaronids, who took remnants of the Judeans back to Jerusalem, reestablished the Temple, and then ritualized the reading of the Bible that they finished redacting during this period. Many scholars consider Ezra the Priest, also called the Scribe for his literary activity, in the fifth century BCE as the final Redactor or Editor, but he is referred to by modern Bible scholars who refer to him as R.

The Maximalist-Minimalist Debate

As a result of serious biblical scholarship as well as archaeological discoveries made over the past 150 years, a new brand of skepticism has swept the world of both Bible scholars and archaeologists, especially in the past two decades. It is usually referred to as the Maximalist-Minimalist Debate. It is hard to pinpoint when it began. It is my opinion that a new form of archaeological research in the 1960s and 1970s, which became known as the New Archaeology, revisited old archaeological suppositions, and as a result of this revisit, a new form of skepticism was born just as critically trained Bible scholars began to use these new archaeological conclusions in their own studies. The New Archaeology separated archaeology almost entirely from texts of any kind and tried to answer small and detailed questions without any need to solve biblical questions. Academic training of archaeologists changed as well with few archaeologists being trained in the scientific study of the Bible. This led to new and very significant conclusions about major archaeological questions all over the world, but most profoundly in Israel and Egypt.

Suddenly major sections of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, came under assault. The Patriarchal traditions as well as the Exodus account in the first two books of the Bible were rendered invalid questions for archaeology. At the same time that the archaeology of Israel and Egypt were disconnected from the Bible, archaeological work in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, in Sinai and Egypt made many new discoveries but little that confirmed the biblical story. In this same period, scientific questions arose about material culture in ancient cities in Israel and whether any of these finds could demonstrate a major influx of immigrants in the Iron Age (as the Bible states). The New Archaeology while attempting to remove itself from any textual questions, brought into question the entire written record from the books of Joshua, Judges, and I and II Samuel. This fed the biblical scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s that raised questions about the entire Hebrew Bible. These questions led both archaeologists and Bible scholars to square off into two major camps by the 1990s. Groups of Maximalists and Minimalists developed as these issues were discussed in both popular and academic publications. Fundamentalist Maximalists held that every single word in the Bible was true and used archaeological discoveries only when it bolstered their case. The Non-Fundamentalist Maximalists extrapolated from every single archaeological discovery an argument in favor of the authenticity of larger and larger parts of the Bible and used some of the critical Bible study information. On the other side, the Minimalists insisted that every single archaeological discovery could and should be evaluated only as providing information about itself and that these discoveries could not solve any real larger, biblical questions.

In the archaeological camp are some extreme revisionists with an anti-Zionist agenda who questioned the actual collection of archaeological data by Israeli archaeologists and extreme revisionists among biblical scholars who have used Minimalist assumptions being propagated by some archaeologists to build theories for a very late date for the Bible’s composition. The patriarchs and matriarchs, the Egyptian captivity and Exodus, the Judges and early prophets, the kings and queens are all the result of a late Persian-Hellenistic period of creativity and have little or no ancient antecedent.

The divide between these two camps, Maximalists and Minimalists, began to manifest itself in articles, professional meetings, television documentaries, and then in books. Stances varied from scholars of the New Archaeology and the new critical Bible scholars who staked claims to the Maximalist and Minimalist positions. One of the most venerated scholars of the New Archaeology, William Dever, who was one of the first to begin the early reexamination of the biblical claims, has himself come under fire as he has staked out a more moderate Minimalist-Maximalist stance. I define myself as a Minimalist-Maximalist. I really do see each discovery as giving us only information about itself, but because extrapolation is a part of the modern scientific method we must see how every archaeological discovery affects the whole study of the Bible. My study of the Bible includes critical Bible studies, but it does not end with them. I have colleagues who work with archaeology derived from the Americas and have texts written in various time periods that are critically studied and constantly used to inform the archaeologists’ understanding of Mayan, Aztec, and Incan discoveries. Similarly, all discoveries in Egypt are read in light of Egyptian texts that are critical studies and date from different time periods, so you can see that this kind of Maximalist-Minimalist debate is not unique to the field of Biblical archaeology, but a common source of conflict across areas of study.

So Where Do We Go from Here?

I will not enter into the discussion of whether the Bible is divinely inspired, revealed, or directly dictated to humans. Much the same way that the theory of evolution can only begin from the most ancient forms of life and trace it from there to higher forms of life without really speculating on what came before these forms of life, so too the biblical text can be traced back to its textual antecedents and I will not speculate on how these traditions were transmitted to human beings. It is as it is; a text that grew and continued to be orally passed on creating more and more interpretations of the revelations given to individuals over more than a thousand years. These traditions that were written down by a variety of authors and edited together in the Bible do not always agree because people had oral traditions that were passed down to them, and their writing down of this tradition reflected their own human personality and interests on individual characters. These writers sometimes show us varying portraits of the patriarchs, matriarchs, kings, prophets, priests, and almost everyone mentioned in the Bible not only because the authors had different information but also because they had their own views of the world, power, and religion. The writers did not live in the same areas or even in the same time period, so these discrepancies are to be expected. This process sometimes reminds me of the way that an opposition Democratic legislator might describe a Republican administration and a Republican legislator would describe a Democratic administration. The same events would be seen through the lens of their own ideological beliefs. So too, it appears that the biblical writers wrote about the figures of Abraham, Sarah, the patriarchs, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Saul, Solomon, and probably every individual in antiquity. Simple parts